


The Light Still Calls

by KeepCalmLoveSeverus



Category: Moana (2016)
Genre: Adventure & Romance, Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, also i dont do smut so if yall are hoping for explicit sex this is not the place for you, duh - Freeform, however y'all may get frequent updates since i'm procrastinating studying for finals, i can't help it ok the rock is gorgeous, i don't do kiddy porn, i only have the first chapter written right now haha, i spent the whole movie just imagining him in maui's place lmao, people are not going to like this ship and i'm well aware, there is also some, they don't get together till maui deals with some of his issues and moana grows up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-25
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 03:38:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8650003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeepCalmLoveSeverus/pseuds/KeepCalmLoveSeverus
Summary: Life is sailing across a calm blue ocean. Love is what happens along the way.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [machumachumachu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/machumachumachu/gifts).



> first: i am very white. i do not know any pacific islanders. i tried to use pacific island websites to source names and such; i used google translate for samoan titles "tinamatua" and "tamamatua" aka grandma and grandpa. the names are (as near as I could tell) a mix between hawaiian, samoan, and tahitian
> 
> second: i bought the soundtrack and heard the "More Outtake" and i was like .... "there's gotta be more after they get back on the ocean. they were pretty good friends at the end and i doubt he'd like ... abandon the one human who never demanded he do something so she'd like him" (since she liked him on his own merits and the returning the heart thing was really just asking him to rectify a mistake he'd made which is perfectly reasonable)
> 
> third: i've been awake and at work for like ....... three days so if you see any glaring errors please let me know. i hate healthcare and thanksgiving because no one wants to work holidays
> 
> fourth: if you are a pacific islander and would like to tell me what i've fucked up (cuz i know eventually there's gonna be something) do not be shy. speak up and let me know! i do not want to butcher your culture!!!!!!!!! on the flip side, i know it isn't your job to educate me, and i'll be doing lots of research before putting any big traditions in here
> 
> fifth: i'm gifting this to machumachumachu because they're the only other person to have written a moana fanfic lmao

“Tinamatua, Tinamatua, tell us again how you met Tamamatua!” There’s a chorus of agreements, and Moana looks down in amusement to see a crowd of her grandchildren gather in front of her, sitting cross-legged on the gently rocking boat deck. She’s standing at the sail, a babe in a sling on her chest. Her newest granddaughter has proven to be very fussy, and the only reason she’s on the boat at all is because the waves are the only thing that calm her.

With a small chuckle, Moana asks, “Why on earth would you want to hear such a silly story as that? After all, the meeting was _not_ the interesting part.”

The children groan and begin to clamor over each other with reasons, voices reaching a crescendo until she gives them all her signature stern look, lips pursed and eyebrows drawn down slightly. “If you wake Tala, no one will be hearing any stories, and I’ll send you all off to clean fish guts.”

There’s a collective groan of disgust, followed by comedic shushing, as no one wants to test her to see if she’s serious. (She is. Tala is just as opinionated as her namesake, and although Moana loves her to pieces, she’s getting to be too old for overnight wayfinding, no matter Maui’s ideas about wayfinders not needing sleep. They can’t all be demigods.) A veritable sea of brown eyes stares up at her; wriggling bodies jostle against each other; they are young, and when excited they squirm like a pile of piglets.

“Now,” she begins, spreading her legs apart so she can stand comfortably for long enough to tell the story. Her joints tire easily, and she knows she’ll have to sit down at some point, but she _also_ knows that when she does, little Tala will wake up and raise hell. She’s going to avoid that for as long as possible. “This isn’t a love story – ah, don’t interrupt me, Ahomana, you are too young to be thundering so. You need at least another year to grow into your name, young man.” The little boy in question had a mop of curly hair, reminding her of Maui after his exile on that rock, and she smiles fondly at the memory.

“Where was I?” she asks with a slightly pointed look; she hasn’t forgotten, of course, but it’s always good to know the children are actually listening to her, instead of hearing what they want to.

Anale’a, a girl with bright eyes and a crooked smile that matches her mischievous personality, speaks up. “You were telling us it isn’t a love story. But, Grandma, you do love Grandpa, don’t you?”

Moana adjusts the sail, teasing them by appearing to think very hard about it. Fetia, optimistic as always, insists, “Of course she does! She’s just playing games because that’s what grandmas do!” For a girl of seven, she has quite a lot of opinions. Moana would worry about her, but she was quite the same at that age, and she turned out alright, didn’t she?

Smiling, she tells the group, which has now grown to include several of the older children who finished their work quickly when they realized she was story-telling, “You didn’t ask for the story of how we fell in love. You asked how we met. And when we met, your Tamamatua was barely more mature than any of you, for all he was older than me.” One of her sons comes up to take control of the sail, and she walks toward the group of children, bending down as though to tell them a secret. “In fact, when I met your grandpa, I had to snatch him up by the ear!” With a playful grin, she does just that to Ahomana, who shrieks in surprise and glee.

Ruefully, she adds, “Of course, it didn’t do much. I was but a girl of fourteen and he, for all he’d been stranded on an island for a thousand years, was still quite a bit stronger than me.”

Anale’a is very sincere as she asks, “But now you just beat him into submission with your paddle, right?”

Moana throws her head back, laughing with her whole body. Sun-baked wrinkles are thrown into stark relief, showing every year of her journey so far, but she doesn’t mind. Tala squirms a bit in the sling, but settles down quickly. She apparently loves her tinamatua’s stories already.

“Of course I do, my dear. And he is always very embarrassed because, you see, he signed that paddle for me when we first met!” Moana is still smiling when a pair of heavy hands rest lightly on her shoulders, the large body curving around hers like a protective conch shell; long hair drapes over her shoulder as her husband leans forward to speak to the crowd at large.

His voice is still as deep and unbroken as the day they met, and Moana feels a familiar pang at the thought that to him, her life is but the blink of an eye. She worries about the pain her death will cause him, but knows she has loved him enough for ten men, and that it will have to be enough, though she sometimes thinks she will never be able to give him enough love to stop feeling as though it is bubbling out of her like an underwater volcano.

“In my defense, I half thought I had finally gone mad and imagined myself up a friend; you have no idea how shocked I was that my imagination created a bossy little girl who tried to menace me with an oar.” His voice rises into a falsetto, and she knows what is coming. “I am Moana, and I enjoy hitting demigods with oars and bossing them around.” His lips are twitching as he looks at her out of the corner of his eye, and she scowls at him.

“And then he tries to maroon me on the same island he was stuck on! I would have died there.” She’s smug as she adds, “Luckily for me that I’ve always been cleverer than you, isn’t it, my dear?”

Maui shrugs, nothing to say in defense to that; instead, he asks the children, “Has she told you about how she saved me from a massive, glow-in-the-dark crab?”

The children, despite having heard that part hundreds of times as well, begin to cheer. Tala wakes up fully and Moana sighs, resigned to having a tired baby on board a smaller-by-the-second ship. Maui, however, has different plans, and takes the babe out of her cradle, making faces and letting her play with his tattoos until she settles.

It’s the little things that remind her why she gave an arrogant, cocky demigod a chance.

(Well, and his muscles didn’t hurt either once she’d fully settled into puberty. But it was years before he saw her as anything other than a little sister. He really could be a gentleman when he tried.)

“Wait!” Fetia yells over her siblings and cousins. “We _all_ know the crab story! I want to know how you fell in _love_!” Several girls let out playful dreamy sighs, and the boys try not to show how interested they are. They all look up to Maui, no matter how hard she tries to dissuade them from that folly, and never miss an opportunity to learn more about him.

“She had to beat me with her oar several more times, for starters,” Maui tells them all with a chuckle; he winces as Tala grabs a chunk of his hair and tugs it into her mouth, but he doesn’t take it back, and she sees the fond smile he’s trying to hide.

“That’s not how it happened at all, you overgrown shrub, and you know it. How many times have I told you that you need a trim? Maybe she will pull it all out, and you’ll learn your lesson.” The bickering is playful, warm, and filled with decades of shared life; he knows she doesn’t truly want him to cut his hair, same as she knows he would if she asked him seriously. At her age, though, his hair is a petty thing, and they got along better once she stopped trying to boss him around – or rather, stopped expecting him to obey.

“You tell it, then, Your Highness, and I’ll go sit with all the other children and enjoy my long hair.” His continued insistence that she is a princess is a small joke between them, though Hei Hei is long dead and her animal companions have changed several times since then.

“Begone, then!” She banishes him to the circle of children with a loving kiss on his cheek, and settles in against the mast to tell their story. It’s been a long voyage, but she wouldn’t change it for the whole ocean.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is in first person on purpose. Also why the hell is it so hard to maintain verb tense in first person????? 
> 
> Aka an open letter on why Jaz hates English

It was several days' sail from Te Fiti to Motunui, which gave me plenty of time to think about everything that had happened. The Kakamora, Tamatoa, and restoring the heart ... I had never thought of myself as a particularly special girl before. Odd, yes, because I could not stay away from the ocean as my father ordered me to, but not at all special. 

But now? I had helped Maui, Demigod of the Wind and Sea, etc., save the world as we knew it. And even though he was over a thousand years old, he seemed to waver between vast maturity and bravery and, well, behaving like one of my age mates on the island. It had become surprisingly easy to forget that I was speaking to a person who had, by his own account anyway, pulled the sun into the sky and harnessed the breeze. 

That thought reminded me to check my bearings, and I stuck my hand into the water before adjusting my oar and sail just a bit. The wind was staying fairly constant -- at this rate, I should get home far faster than leaving. 

The wind made me think, though. If Maui had been born to human parents, how had he been around to pull the sun down? I mean, it wasn't surprising that he might pad his reputation a bit, but it did make me think he was little better than the other teenage boys I knew. Watching my father had taught me that a man did not have to lie about his accomplishments, because they would speak for themselves. 

But then, Maui had been trapped on an island for thousands of years. During that time, he had been recast as the villain in our legends, despite all he'd done for us in truth. Was it any wonder that he would want to make the first human he had seen in so long think he was extra brave and clever? I didn't think so. Being a demigod was all well and good, but I thought I preferred being raised by loving humans rather than distant gods, for all I had sometimes chafed under their restrictions. Humans understood failure, and understood that it was quite normal not to be good at everything the first time you tried it; our gods are loving and beneficent, but I would hazard a guess that none of them ever failed at anything. 

And Maui was born human; it wasn't possible for the gods to get rid of his humanity completely -- at least, I didn't think so. He had seemed pretty human to me. 

After all, I had never heard of a god sulking. 

At that moment, as though he had heard my laugh and known it was about him, Maui let out a loud shriek and dove to land on the deck of my ship. I had known he was following me, of course -- you didn't see a lot of large birds in the middle of the ocean. He must have gotten worried when I hadn't left Te Fiti immediately, but to be honest I had been so completely exhausted that I probably would have sailed back to Lalotai on accident! Which, now that I thought about it ... 

"Whatcha thinking about, princess?" Obviously he was going to act like he hadn't been following me. Of course. 

My protest that I was the daughter of the chief fell on deaf ears, which I expected. He was definitely as pigheaded as most boys I knew. 

"Tamatoa, if you really care," I said sweetly. 

"What?" His disgust is evident. "Why on earth would you still be thinking about that puffed up crab?"

I rolled my eyes. "You don't even feel a little bad that we left him like that?" I hadn't realized that I did until that exact moment, but now that we were on the subject, it really wasn't right. Sure, he'd tried to kill us, but Maui hadn't exactly asked nicely, so technically we'd been stealing from him. Especially since everyone had thought Maui was dead. 

"No, I don't. I was actually quite happy with how we left him. A thousand years on his back might change his attitude." With his arms crossed over his chest and a small pout on his face, Maui looked like a child whose favorite kite had been taken away. 

"Yeah, it did wonders for you," I muttered. Making a decision, I trimmed the sail so it wouldn't flap when I turned the boat, and pushed the oar to the left. I might have only been there once, but the location of Lalotai's entrance was seared into my brain; that had been the most frightening thing I'd ever done. 

"What are you doing? No. No way, we are not going back there just to help him. He's just as likely to eat us as look at us! Moana, are you even listening to me?" 

He moved to stand in front of me, blocking my view of the horizon, and I jutted my chin out mulishly, looking straight at his chest instead of meeting his eye. "I'm not asking you to come with me, now am I? You feel free to go do whatever it is that demigods do when they aren't stealing from goddesses or hacking limbs off crabs." That was probably a low blow, and I regretted saying it, but not enough to take it back. He wasn't my father, to order me around, and even when my father did it I only listened one time in ten!

He drew in a deep breath, chest expanding massively and tattoos stretching in an exaggerated manner, and I prepared myself for whatever diatribe he was going to come out with about how I was a silly little girl and just because I'd saved the world didn't mean I could take on whatever monster I pleased. 

Obviously I was already telling myself all of this, but now that he'd told me I shouldn't I felt even more obliged to go do it. 

I was shocked when the air whooshed out of him as though I'd hit him with my paddle, and he muttered a sullen, "Fine," and went to sit up at the front of the boat with Hei Hei. 

I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. My grandma had been better at playing this game than him.  "That's it? No lecture? No leaving and saying I can do it alone?" I obviously still wasn't over him abandoning me in the middle of the ocean, no matter how happy I had been to see him then. He'd just left! Like a coward, because things had gotten a little hard! 

Waialiki women were notorious for holding grudges, and apparently I'd inherited that ability. I could feel my anger at him, previously pushed down because of my sheer joy at still being alive, bubbling up out of me. 

But, I bit my tongue. He'd flinched when I mentioned it, curling his shoulders in on himself. And I had always prided myself on never being deliberately malicious; I was a good girl, with a calm head on her shoulders. Most of the time. 

He didn't answer me, but he didn't leave either, and I huffed out an agitated breath as I checked our course. "Fine. Lalotai, here we come."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is a little short but I'm on my lunch break at work and I wanted to post something for all my lovely reviewers!!!

**Author's Note:**

> Please review I thrive on validation


End file.
